Unreal Engine 4.22 Preview 1 Available

Unreal Engine 4.22 will be available soon, and you can now get your hands on the first Preview using the Epic Games launcher. Please note that Preview 1 includes support for real-time ray tracing, Editor Utility Widgets, Blueprint indexing optimizations, virtual production updates, Oculus Quest support and the Unreal Audio Engine is now on by default for new projects.

Art by Adam Tinning

Animation Updates:

• Animation Budgeting System (Early Access)
• Animation Sharing Plugin. Added a new plugin which implements an Animation Sharing system. The system is used for reducing the overall amount of animation work required for a crowd of actors.
• Preview Scene Settings Improvements. Will allow the user to hide Environment Cubemap without disabling lighting
• Per Platform Properties Improvements. Per Platform Properties have been extended to allow for setting values based on Target Platform in addition to the Platform Groups.

Audio Updates:

• New Unreal Audio Engine now on by Default for New Projects
• TimeSynth. TimeSynth is a new audio clip based synth component focused on providing designers with sample-accurate start, stop, and concatenation sound playback.
• Layered Sound Concurrency. The Sound Concurrency System now observes multiple settings/groups.
• Spectral Analyzer for Submixed Added to Real-Time Analysis Tools. In addition to the Envelope Follower, designers can now analyze a Submix’s Spectral Energy during gameplay to drive Blueprint automation.
• Improvements to Sound Asset Importing. The team has improved sound asset importing, in addition to supporting multi-channel wav files, Unreal Engine now converts from a variety of sound file formats upon import including AIFF, FLAC, and OGG/Vorbis.
• Improvements to MIDI Device Plugin. Improvements have been made to the MIDI Device Plugin allowing users to not only process MIDI Device Input, but also send MIDI Messages Out to Devices.

Automation Updates:

• Gauntlet Improvements
  • Expanded documentation & samples
  • iOS Support
  • Device Service
  • Profile Guided Optimization
  • Report Creation

Dev Tools Updates:

• Visual Studio 2019. Support for Visual Studio 2019 has been added. By default, UE4 will still use the Visual Studio 2017 compiler if you have it installed.
• Build Time Improvements. The team has made a large number of optimizations to UnrealBuildTool and UnrealHeaderTool to improve C++ iteration times.
• Support for long filenames (Experimental). Historically, paths in windows have been limited to 260 characters, which can cause problems for projects with complex naming conventions and deep hierarchies of assets. The Windows 10 Anniversary Update adds support for much longer filenames, on the condition that the user and each application opt-in to it.

Editor Updates:

• Subsystems. Subsystems are auto instanced classes with managed lifetimes. These classes provide easy to use extension points where the programmers can avoid the complexity of modifying or overriding engine classes while simultaneously getting Blueprint and Python exposure out of the box.
• Editor Utility Widgets. Editor Utility Widgets are based on UMG, so you can modify the layout of the Editor user interface, and set up Blueprints for logic just as you can with a UMG widget.
• Material Analyzer. The Material Analyzer can be found under Window > Developer Tools. If you open the Material Analyzer right when the Editor starts, it will wait for the Asset registry to finish loading.

Gameplay & Scripting Updates:

• Blueprint Indexing Optimizations. Improved editor startup/load times by deferring Blueprint search data re-indexing work until a global Find-in-Blueprint tab is opened.

You can find the full list of updates here.